“I was standing in the most absolute aloneness that I had ever been given.”
― James Dickey, quote from Deliverance
“What a view, i said again. The river was blank and mindless with beauty. It was the most glorious thing I have ever seen. But it was not seeing, really. For once it was not just seeing. It was beholding. I beheld the river in its icy pit of brightness, in its far-below sound and indifference, in its large coil and tiny points and flashes of the moon, in its long sinuous form, in its uncomprehending consequence.”
― James Dickey, quote from Deliverance
“The body is the one thing you can't fake; it's just got to be there.”
― James Dickey, quote from Deliverance
“I just believe,' he said, 'that the whole thing is going to be reduced to the human body, once and for all. I want to be ready.... I think the machines are going to fail, the political systems are going to fail, and a few men are going to take to the hills and start over.... I had an air-raid shelter built,' he said. 'I'll take you down there sometime. We've got double doors and stocks of bouillon and bully beef for a couple of years at least. We've got games for the kids, and a record player and a whole set of records on how to play the recorder and get up a family recorder group. But I went down there one day and sat for a while. I decided that survival was not in the rivets and the metal, and not in the double-sealed doors and not in the marbles of Chinese checkers. It was in me. It came down to the man, and what he could do. The body is the one thing you can't fake; it's just got to be there.... At times I get the feeling I can't wait. Life is so fucked-up now, and so complicated, that I wouldn't mind if it came down, right quick, to the bare survival of who was ready to survive. You might say I've got the survival craze, the real bug. And to tell you the truth I don't think most other people have. They might cry and tear their hair and be ready for some short hysterical violence or other, but I think most of them wouldn't be too happy to give down and get it over with.... If everything wasn't dead, you could make a kind of life that wasn't out of touch with everything, with other forms of life. Where the seasons would mean something, would mean everything. Where you could hunt as you needed to, and maybe do a little light farming, and get along. You'd die early, and you'd suffer, and your children would suffer, but you'd be in touch.”
― James Dickey, quote from Deliverance
“I had the feeling that if it were perfectly quiet, if I could hear nothing, I would never wake up. Something in the world had to pull me back, for every night I went down deep, and if I had any sensation during sleep, it was of going deeper and deeper, trying to reach a point, a line or border.”
― James Dickey, quote from Deliverance
“After four hours I passed slowly from the country of 'nine-fingered people and prepare to meet thy God' into the drive-ins and motels and Homes of the Whopper but all I could see was the river.”
― James Dickey, quote from Deliverance
“Not a good man. Drinks too much in an uncreative way.”
― James Dickey, quote from Deliverance
“Sliding is living antifriction. Or, no, sliding is living by antifriction. It is finding a modest thing you can do, and then greasing that thing. On both sides. It is grooving with comfort.”
― James Dickey, quote from Deliverance
“That’s all anybody has got. It depends on how strong your fantasy is, and whether you really — really — in your own mind, fit into your own fantasy, whether you measure up to what you’ve fantasized. I don’t know what yours is, but I’ll bet you don’t come up to it.”
― James Dickey, quote from Deliverance
“Something or other was being made good. I touched the knife hilt at my side, and remembered that all men were once boys, and that boys are always looking for ways to become men. Some of the ways are easy, too; all you have to do is be satisfied that it has happened.”
― James Dickey, quote from Deliverance
“Nobody worth a damn could ever come from such a place. It was nothing, like most places and people are nothing.”
― James Dickey, quote from Deliverance
“There is always something wrong with people in the country, I thought. In the comparatively few times I had ever been in the rural South I had been struck by the number of missing fingers. Offhand, I had counted around twenty, at least. There had also been several people with some form of crippling or twisting illness, and some blind or one-eyed. No adequate medical treatment, maybe. But there was something else. You’d think that farming was a healthy life, with fresh air and fresh food and plenty of exercise, but I never saw a farmer who didn’t have something wrong with him, and most of the time obviously wrong; I never saw one who was physically powerful, either. Certainly there were none like Lewis. The work with the hands must be fantastically dangerous, in all that fresh air and sunshine, I thought: the catching of an arm in a tractor part somewhere off in the middle of a field where nothing happened but that the sun blazed back more fiercely down the open mouth of one’s screams. And so many snakebites deep in the woods as one stepped over a rotten log, so many domestic animals suddenly turning and crushing one against the splintering side of a barn stall. I wanted none of it, and I didn’t want to be around where it happened either. But I was there, and there was no way for me to escape, except by water, from the country of nine-fingered people. I”
― James Dickey, quote from Deliverance
“The river and everything I remembered about it became a possession to me, a personal, private possession, as nothing else in my life ever had. Now it ran nowhere but in my head, but there it ran as though immortally. I could feel it -- I can feel it -- on different places on my body.... In me it still is, and will be until I die, green, rocky, deep, fast, slow, and beautiful beyond reality.”
― James Dickey, quote from Deliverance
“…just as it's any woman's fault who represents normalcy.”
― James Dickey, quote from Deliverance
James Dickey
Born place: in Atlanta, Georgia, The United States
Born date February 2, 1923
See more on GoodReads
“Never met anyone like her in my life. So giving with her heart. I’ll do anything to protect that heart. I want it to be mine to protect.”
― Belle Aurora, quote from Friend-Zoned
“I thought about how it was impossible to forget, no matter how hard anyone might try.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Green Angel
“Humanity, I’m sure I do not have to tell Your Grace, is a strange animal.”
― Kady Cross, quote from The Girl in the Steel Corset
“The only true voyage, the only Fountain of Youth,” recited Orphu, “would be found not in traveling to strange lands but in having different eyes, in seeing the universe with the eyes of another person, of a hundred others, and seeing the hundred universes each of them sees, which each of them is.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Ilium
“For years, we'd been the thorn of the neighborhood, the dirty little secret that wasn't so secret. The girls who just wouldn't settle.”
― Kat Zhang, quote from What's Left of Me
The Mermaid Chair
If You're Reading Th...
The Blind Watchmaker...
Nefertiti
Dr. Faustus
Honor's SplendourBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
